Read Novel Full Chapter 12 : Three Signs
Chapter 12 : Three Signs
Lao Song's voice message was sixty seconds long. The first fifty were about something else.
First there was the sound of a cart backing up in the shed. After a while, his wife called down from upstairs asking him to eat, and he answered, "Just leave it there." Only in the last ten seconds did his voice drop low.
"That seal you asked about? Let me tell you, the seal stamped on that paper wasn't theirs."
She listened to it again.
The night before, she had posted a line in the rider group: If you signed that "settlement" paper last month, tell me what was written on it and whether there was a seal. If it's too slow to type, send a voice message. She listened to every one.
Nineteen replies came back overnight. Some said, "I signed without looking." Some said, "They took it right back after I signed." One said nothing at all, just left a single period.
Lao Song was the sixth.
She held down the voice message button again and asked, "Can you make out any of the words at the top?"
That reply took ten minutes. In it, he said that before signing, he'd asked the person handing out the papers, "Whose company is this?" The man said, "Ours." He couldn't read most of the words on the paper, but he recognized two: the first was "Sutong," the second "service." At the end, he added,
"Anyway, it wasn't Hurricane Express. If the paper had said Hurricane Express, my hand wouldn't have felt so uneasy signing it."
He Xiufen had said not to question people over the phone. She wrote this one down only as a lead in the margin of her notebook, and she still called him in to talk—he was coming this afternoon.
The computer in the back room took half a minute to boot up. He Xiufen sat by the filing cabinet pasting document envelopes, her glue brush scraping the paper's edge in starts and stops. She glanced at her once, asked nothing.
She typed "Jiangzhou Sutong Delivery" into the search box.
One result came up.
Jiangzhou Sutong Delivery Service Co., Ltd. Date of establishment: March 2021. Registered capital: five hundred thousand yuan. In the legal representative column was a name: Wang Yuhai. The last line of the business scope read "food delivery services," preceded by freight forwarding, loading, and unloading.
Registered address: No. 36 Changqing Street, fifth floor, Old Town District.
Exactly the same address Hurricane Express had registered, down to the word.
She clicked through to the annual report and turned to the previous year: the employee count column was filled in as zero.
She copied the name into her notebook, moved her pen downward, and went back to the three bank statements she'd noted the day before yesterday. The payer account column all began with the word "Wang."
She studied the two Wangs side by side for a while. She drew a line beneath them but didn't connect it upward. A surname couldn't pin down a person; connecting them would only mean telling herself a story.
After copying the address, she stopped with her finger at the edge of the screen: No. 36 Changqing Street, fifth floor. She had gone to that address two days ago.
She swiped back two photos in her phone. The first was the door number. The second was the three signs on that door.
That day, the name she'd been looking for was Hurricane Express. Of the three signs on the door, she'd only paid attention to the first two—one for an accounting agency, one for a trading company. The third was nailed lower, smaller, newer. She'd taken it for some little company unrelated to all this. She enlarged the photo until the words blurred. The writing on the third sign was arranged in two lines. The first line read: Jiangzhou Sutong Delivery Service Co., Ltd.
She looked over the three signs again from the beginning.
Three signs nailed to one door, and none of them said Hurricane Express. Yet the other company's registered address was written right here, in this same room.
[Thud. This sign. You photographed it two days ago.]
She drew three lines in her notebook.
Line one: Hurricane Express (Jiangzhou) Network Technology Co., Ltd. The orders run through its app, the boxes carry its logo, and when a customer asks which company it is, riders answer with its name.
Line two: Jiangzhou Sutong Delivery Service Co., Ltd. The same room, with an annual report listing zero employees.
Line three: Sun. The station, one word on the IOU, one word on the shift schedule.
She set down her pen after writing those three lines. On the lowest layer, the page held only a surname, and after the surname was blank.
[Thud. Layer by layer it gets wrapped, until at the bottom no one can recognize him.]
"Found it." He Xiufen laid the glue brush across the mouth of an envelope.
"Found a name."
"Is there a person behind the name?"
"On paper, yes. In that room, no."
He Xiufen turned the envelope over and tapped it twice, dust falling onto the concrete floor. "A name with a person behind it means collecting money. A name with no one behind it means fighting for pride."
"I want both."
"If you want both, you have to find a person first." She pressed the envelope flap flat. "What you're holding right now is nothing but other people's names."
In the afternoon, Lao Song parked his electric scooter outside the noodle shop, came in, and took off his hat. He Xiufen set a bowl of noodles beside him. "Eight yuan."
He pushed the money over. He Xiufen took it, wrote a line in the hardbound ledger, and turned back toward the stove.
She held out the photo on her phone, cropped to show only the third sign.
Lao Song squinted at it for a long time. "Looks like it. Those two words are what I recognized that day."
"The two words you recognized that day were exactly these." She said, "Do you remember the line below them?"
"The print was too small. He pointed at the bottom and told me to sign and press my thumbprint. I did. After that, he said the company files everything, and he took the paper away."
"You didn't keep a copy."
"No." Lao Song pulled the bowl closer. "If I'd known it would end up in a lawsuit, I would've taken a photo."
"What about the seal?"
"Lower right corner. Round, red. I couldn't make out all the words inside, but I recognized two: Sutong and service."
"Who was the one handing out the papers?"
"A young guy in his early twenties. No uniform. Carrying a bag and a stack of papers. He stood at the door asking people one by one. If anyone wouldn't sign, he moved on."
"Was Station Manager Sun there?"
"He was. Sitting inside. He didn't come out."
"What about the money?"
"It was still paid by a Wang, with the same 'settled' note. When the money came in, a line popped up on my phone telling me to click 'confirm receipt.' I clicked it."
"Who told you to click it?"
"That same young guy with the papers."
She wrote it all down item by item. Signing, thumbprinting, clicking confirm—all three had come from his own hand.
"Lao Song, I'll write down what you remember," she said. "But in court, if they ask me where that paper is, I won't be able to produce it."
Lao Song tapped his chopsticks against the rim of the bowl. "Then what's this half a mouth of mine worth?"
"It's a place to ask questions," she said. "None of the other doors will answer."
He finished the noodles, drank the soup, and then gave his own accounting. Signing that paper had gotten him back fifty percent, and the money had come through. This month, he'd still received a thirty-day order restriction.
"Who else at the station signed it?"
"Seven or eight signed last month. Xiao Duan didn't. His signing didn't go through."
"What has Station Manager Sun said in front of you?"
Lao Song thought for a while.
"On the night of the fifteenth last month, at the barbecue stand outside the station. He'd had too much to drink. He said, 'This station is my contract. I take twenty-five fen a run. The people don't belong to the company. If anything goes wrong, it's on me.'"
"Who else was there?"
"Xiao Duan, and two others."
She wrote the sentence down verbatim, then added the date, the place, and the people present. When she looked up, Lao Song was watching her, probably failing to see what those words could be worth.
"You asked me today, so I'll tell you straight," she said. "Signing that paper wasn't wrong, and you didn't get more money than you should have. But from now on, if anyone asks you to sign anything, don't sign a single page."
"Yesterday they tried to get me to sign an 'appeal document.'"
"Did you sign?"
"No. I told him I can't read."
She smiled. By the stove, He Xiufen lowered the heat and turned her head to add,
"This case—you push down one layer, and the other side pulls back one layer. Years ago I took a case wrapped in three layers. By the end, even the name of the person who owed him money wasn't written out fully in the judgment."
Lao Song got up to leave. At the door, he pushed his scooter a couple of steps and turned back.
"Attorney Shen, how deep will you take this lawsuit?"
"Until he admits it."
"Then you'd better find someone willing to admit it first."
Dark came early. She was adding a line to the last page of her notebook when He Xiufen called her name from downstairs. Each day the riders reported "no orders today," and she recorded a line. Today was the tenth day.
"Yours." He Xiufen held up a kraft envelope, wiping her other hand on her apron. "From the Arbitration Office. Sign here."
The envelope was stiff and bulging on one side. After signing, she went upstairs and opened it at the square table in the back.
Inside was a Supplementary Defense Statement, a Supplementary Evidence List, and at the bottom, a one-page Explanatory Statement, its edges carrying gray photocopy smudges.
The first point in the Supplementary Defense Statement read:
"The Applicant and the Respondent do not have an employment relationship. The actual employing entity in this case is a third party, Jiangzhou Sutong Delivery Service Co., Ltd., and the Applicant should pursue its claims against that entity separately."
These same words had taken her half an hour to decipher this morning from a small sign nailed to a door.
Now they were printed in bold on the first line of someone else's document, and the next sentence had already mapped out her next step for her.
[Thud. This page—they wrote it for you.]
The signature block bore the law firm's red seal. Below it was a handwritten signature, the strokes straight, the final stroke ending cleanly. She swept her eyes past it and turned the page.
He Xiufen brought a bowl of soup from the stove and looked over the papers under the light.
"He's written this part correctly."
"Correct."
"Correct papers are the hardest to fight." He Xiufen set the soup down and headed back to the stove.
The Explanatory Statement ran a page and a half. The seal at the bottom belonged to Jiangzhou Sutong Delivery Service Co., Ltd., and the date was two days before the materials had been delivered. The main text read smoothly: This company is one of the delivery service providers for the Hurricane Express platform in the Jiangzhou area. The riders at the Chengnan station are recruited, managed, and settled independently by the station's contractor, Sun X. They have no labor or service relationship with this company.
Black on white, not one sentence wasted.
She stared at the name "Sun X."
Last time it was on the IOU: a red thumbprint and a "Sun." This time it was printed: a surname followed by an X. In her notebook, the space after that word had been blank. The other side had made the omission for her.
She opened the notebook to the line marked "Dispatch Record."
Two blank spaces remained below it.
In the first space, she had written: Sutong.
The second space was still empty.
She pulled up the photo on her phone and zoomed in until only the third sign remained. The hallway light had washed out half the words on the sign white. The last part of the company name was still fairly clear.
Downstairs, tables were being cleared, the clink of bowl against bowl rising in waves. She laid her phone face-down on the notebook, the two blank spaces facing the light.